J.K. Rowling has a Responsibility to Understand That Words Can Hurt
With a massive platform comes massive potential to cause harm.
Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash
When my niece, Jesse, was two years old — as soon as she was capable of speech — she started to let anyone who would listen to her know that she was a girl.
When she was a couple of years older she told my sister, her grandmother, that she’d wear boy’s clothes — but that she was only pretending to be a boy. That was when my sister, an evangelical Christian, understood that she really did have a granddaughter.
Jesse is a girl. She’s in the second grade. There’s no way to spend more than a few minutes with her without knowing that she’s a girl the same way my daughters are. She just is a girl.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around how painful and difficult it must have been today for Jesse’s mom, who is a major J.K. Rowling fan, to see a Tweet from one of her heroes that read like this:
Screenshot: Author
The Maya in question is Maya Forstater, a researcher who was fired from her job. From that link: